Oculus founder says Macs aren't up to the demands of VR

"That's up to Apple, and if they ever release a good computer, we will do it." That's the rather blunt way that Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus, describes the current status of Rift support on the Mac. Luckey slammed Apple's platform during an interview with Shacknews, which you can watch below:

Luckey says the problem is Cupertino's tendency to use lower-end dedicated GPUs when it uses them at all. He notes that "you can buy a $6,000 Mac Pro with the top of the line AMD FirePro D700s, and it still doesn't match our recommended specs."

The man does have a point. The recommended specifications for a good VR experience with the Rift call for a GeForce GTX 970 or Radeon R9 290 graphics card. For reference, the Retina-screened iMacs come with a selection of Radeon R9 M380X or R9 M395X graphics cards, while the Mac Pros pack FirePro 300, 500, or 700-series GPUs. It's safe to say these computers aren't fully up to the task of running VR the way Oculus envisions it.

The Oculus founder believes that the problem lies with Apple's current priorities. "If [Apple] prioritized high-end GPUs like they used to for a while back in the day, I think that [...] we'd love to support Mac. But right now, there's not a single machine out there that supports [the Rift]." He goes on to point out that "even if we could support it on the software side, there's just no audience of people that can run the vast majority of the software out there."

Lack of Mac support doesn't seem to be affecting Oculus a single polygon, though. Luckey said the company already has a months-long backlog of orders, and more are piling up by the day.